Anthropic PBC is angling to be a major direct provider of legal technology with its latest rollout of legal tools, extending beyond its original role as a maker of frontier large language models.<\/p>\n
The company, valued at $380 billion, unveiled this week 12 new AI tools, or plugins, for specific practice areas including corporate, regulatory, and employment law. Those plugins are bundles of various skills for the company\u2019s AI model Claude and connections to other legal software, it said.<\/p>\n
General purpose tools like Claude, OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Google\u2019s Gemini are racing to define what the future of legal work looks like, versus tailored tech solutions built for lawyers by smaller companies. Claude was the favored AI powering legal tech companies behind the scenes even before Anthropic announced its updates. But now legal technology consultants and analysts said the new products could change Anthropic\u2019s role in the legal industry.<\/p>\n
The question is whether the bigger platforms can be all-in-one tools for legal professionals\u2014including in-house teams\u2014or if attorneys need AI built by niche vendors. Legal tech companies have pitched themselves as sensitive to the needs of lawyers, and Anthropic has begun making a similar case to the legal market. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis represents a major transition for Claude from backroom to front room,\u201d Rudy DeFelice, who consults with corporate legal teams at Harbor, said in an email. \u201cRather than being the model that vertical tools rely on, Claude is positioning itself as the infrastructure through which work gets done.\u201d <\/p>\n
Room for Others<\/p>\n
The new tools are significant for under-resourced teams looking for technology that can help with many different tasks, said Tommie Tavares-Ferreira, chief strategy officer at Lawtrades.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor cash-constrained in-house teams, this is a clear win,\u201d Tavares-Ferreira said in an email. \u201cTwenty-plus connectors, twelve practice-area plugins, and Claude carrying context across Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint\u2014that\u2019s a Swiss army knife in a market crowded with point solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, Claude can\u2019t do everything\u2014which is why she said point solutions still have a role: \u201cA Swiss army knife is great until you need to slice a steak.\u201d<\/p>\n
Specialized players continue to make research and development investments to push further into their niches, Tavares-Ferreira said. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s room for big tech players and specialized tools, especially with Anthropic partnering more directly with prominent legal tech vendors, Gartner analyst Chris Audet said.<\/p>\n
\u201cGartner continues to assert that foundational models and application layers are necessary,\u201d Audet said in an email. <\/p>\n
A Turn Toward Specificity<\/p>\n
Anthropic says it\u2019s not backing away from its work alongside tech vendors. Mark Pike, associate general counsel with the company, pointed to more than 20 links between outside legal tech software and Claude, or connectors, the company also rolled out at the same time this week. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a better together story,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Pike said other companies developing legal tech will benefit from the new plugins, and the company is creating an open ecosystem where others can build on Claude.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see this step as in furtherance of building an ecosystem that partners have told us they enjoy seeing built on top of Claude,\u201d Pike said.<\/p>\n
Last week\u2019s announcement builds on Anthropic\u2019s earlier rollout of a contract redlining tool for Claude Cowork, a general-purpose AI agent for office work. The build-out of more legal capabilities is based on feedback from attorneys, Anthropic\u2019s Pike said, and follows a Claude for legal webinar that had 20,000 people sign up.<\/p>\n
\u201cLawyers have just really sort of exploded in their use of Claude with the advent of Cowork,\u201d Pike said.<\/p>\n
The previous announcement sent legal tech stocks tumbling in February because it sparked anxiety that Anthropic would take over legal tech. It also caught the attention of buyers trying to decide between enterprise subscriptions to Claude, GPT, or Gemini and more legal-specific tools.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany clients have come to us as they balance enterprise LLM tools with domain-specific legal AI tools, questioning which is worth their next best investment,\u201d Audet said.<\/p>\n
Though the previous product launch made waves, this one is bigger, he said.<\/p>\n
Cowork\u2019s new capabilities include hiring review and handbook updates for employment counsel; NDA triage and software subscription review for commercial counsel; and tools for M&A and public company governance for corporate counsel.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m struck that the tools and skills are focused around specific legal practice areas,\u201d Jason Winmill, who advises legal teams on tech use, said in a text message. \u201cThis kind of domain specific AI is what most in-house attorneys are seeking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where Legal Tech Still Matters<\/p>\n
Niche vendors can separate themselves by being easy to use, said Zach Posner, co-founder of The LegalTech Fund.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are still strong believers that whoever provides the best user experience will end up winning over time, because that\u2019s where the attorney will feel familiar with the software,\u201d Posner said.<\/p>\n
Anthropic, as a large horizontal player, was inevitably going to have interest in the legal industry, just as it has moved into other industries, Posner said. Anthropic might get 80% of the way to being a proper legal tech provider, but the last piece is hard to master, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not positive that anybody trying to solve multiple verticals, multiple practices, is going to be able to take the time and the attention to get that last 20% right,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Where companies like Anthropic stop and smaller vendors can build further is increasingly a moving target. New functions put Anthropic in greater competition with legal tech companies it\u2019s partnering with, and that\u2019s unlikely to change because Anthropic has identified legal as a key industry for its products, Harbor\u2019s DeFelice said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeveral legal-AI companies are built on Claude, but the overlap of features now that plug-ins are legal workflow specific is obvious,\u201d DeFelice said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s hard not to think this is just a first step.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bloomberg Law is a legal technology provider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthropic PBC is angling to be a major direct provider of legal technology with its latest rollout of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1911,53,3154,182,24094,2013,1642,565,9318],"class_list":["post-39103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-acquisitions","tag-anthropic","tag-anthropic-claude","tag-claude","tag-employee-handbooks","tag-in-house-counsel","tag-large-language-models","tag-legal-technology","tag-mergers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}